Arcadia

[sus]

I have the Stoppard play in mind, but feel free to branch out into pastoralism more broadly.

I read the whole thing today, couldn't put it down, I rarely finish books so quickly.

Clever and sad. Romanticism and classicism. Nostalgia, entropy, decay. The inaccessibility of history.

LADY CROOM: But Sidley Park is already a picture, and a most amiable picture too. The slopes are green and gentle. The trees are companionably grouped at intervals that show them to advantage. The rill is a serpentine ribbon unwound from the lake peaceably contained by meadows on which the right amount of sheep are tastefully arranged - in short, it is nature as God intended, and I can say with the painter, 'Et in Arcadia ego 'Here I am in Arcadia,' Thomasina.

THOMASINA: Yes, mama, if you would have it so.

LADY CROOM: Is she correcting my taste or my translation?

THOMASINA: Neither are beyond correction, mama, but it was your geography caused the doubt

BERNARD: Lovely. The Real England.

HANNAH: You can stop being silly now, Bernard. English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the grand tour.

 

[sus]

LADY CROOM: And who is to live in the hermitage?

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT: Why, the hermit.

CROOM: Where is he? You surely do not supply a hermitage without a hermit?

ARCHITECT: Madam?

CROOM: Come, come, Mr. Noakes. If I am promised a fountain I expect it to come with water. What hermits do you have?

ARCHITECT: I have no hermits, my lady.

CROOM: Not one? I am speechless.

HANNAH: The hermit was placed in the landscape exactly as one might place a pottery gnome. And there he lived out his life as a garden ornament.

 

[sus]

Landowners peopled their hermitages either with imaginary hermits or with real hermits – in some cases the landowner even became his own hermit. Those who took employment as garden hermits were typically required to refrain from cutting their hair or washing, and some were dressed as druids.

 

[sus]

In return for their basic accommodation and meals, the applicants would eventually receive a pension. But the small print insisted that they made commitments such as remaining for 7 years, not cutting their hair or nails, and making a vow of silence. Needless to say, there are few records of anyone staying the course, but many a story of the hermit being caught having a good natter in the village pub only a few weeks into his contract.

 

[craner]

 

[sus]

Stoppard's one of England's great playwrights! Surprised no love yet.

 

[sus]

Arcadia (1993), written by English playwright Tom Stoppard, explores the relationship between past and present, order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty.In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it one of the best science-related works ever written.[2]

 

[WashYourHands]

a few words to accompany

 

[sus]

"The whole Romantic sham! It's what happened to the Enlightenment, isn't it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius... The decline from thinking to feeling."

 

[sus]

 

[WashYourHands]

Compare to The Last Bard



Stoppard is someone who’s clearly never lived in vehicle. The Brits have a weird repulsion and attraction to the past in the present, see crap like Time Team. The Irish have shrines, the British have ruins. Both have collective echoes encoded culturally. Probably nowhere near where you hoped this might go. Julian Cope’s Modern Antiquarian, despite the style flaws which will be hammered by certain board members, is still a superb delve into these themes

 

[sus]

English gardens

the new landscape designs made even more decisive breaks with continental gardening than did Pope at Twickenham. Gone were the intricate Italian knot motifs and razor-straight French avenues. Instead, designers opted for sinuous paths, expressed a newfound reliance upon trees, and built a...

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The Garden of Forking Paths

The mathematical theory of bifurcation originated in the seminal work of Henri Poincaré on systems of non-linear differential equations. The term bifurcation was coined by Poincaré to designate the emergence of several solutions from a given solution. Whenever the solution to an equation, or...

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STONER GODOT

A summer villa in southern-central Mexico, on the patio (then roof, then inside to the kitchen, then patio again). Beautiful vines growing on the veranda’s trellis, and the weather is good: sunny with wisps of clouds floating past. Idyllic but semi-empty, meaning-wise. Y is a kind of honorable...

www.dissensus.com

 

[sus]

Stoppard is someone who’s clearly never lived in vehicle. The Brits have a weird repulsion and attraction to the past in the present, see crap like Time Team. The Irish have shrines, the British have ruins. Both have collective echoes encoded culturally. Probably nowhere near where you hoped this might go. Julian Cope’s Modern Antiquarian, despite the style flaws which will be hammered by certain board members, is still a superb delve into these themes

"Lived in vehicle"? Like been homeless?

 

[WashYourHands]

Crusty anarcho style, not Burning Man, more Crass

 

[mvuent]

can you say a bit more about this play suspended? obviously i could read wikipedia or whatever but sometimes it's better to hear a pitch

 

[sus]

can you say a bit more about this play suspended? obviously i could read wikipedia or whatever but sometimes it's better to hear a pitch

Yes, I think you'd like it, I was a big fan.

It takes place in a single room in a British house, landed aristocracy type deal in the countryside, alternating between 1809 and present-day.

The 1809 characters are a young precocious girl named Thomasina and her tutor Septimus. Septimus gets entangled in multiple love triangles, is challenged to duels, and is constantly tripping over himself trying to instruct Thomasina in pure mathematics and geometry, while she keeps grilling him about the meaning of "carnal embrace."

The present-day characters are two writers, Hannah and Bernard, plus the descendents of the 1809 residents. They use the paper trail of the house's old library to piece together a narrative of the past, which is wildly divergent from actual events.

The book is theme- and pun-heavy—lots of stuff about entropy, structure, memory, fashion, rationality vs. feeling, etc

 

[sus]

I think what's addictive about it is putting together a puzzle. A social puzzle. How people's relationships evolve or, more accurately, devolve as the play moves forward.

 

[luka]

have you found an idea yet?

 

[sus]

No! I was hoping other people would help get me to one. I'm still processing. Read it start to finish this afternoon. Lot of threads in there but haven't knit the sweater.

 

[WashYourHands]

Stoppard was born Tomáš Sträussler,[8] in Zlín, a city dominated by the shoe manufacturing industry, in the Moravia region of Czechoslovakia

Music of the Illuminati Study Group

Next up on the "illuminati" website is a thank you to all those people who bought some of their books ( available print on demand on Amazon ). I suppose that includes me, now that I've gone and purchased a couple of them. The AC has always attracted a core of truth seekers. It has also...

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